Industrial Strength SEM

This will be the last installment (finally) of my brand piece. It’s been hard to know where to stop this one as there is really so much to cover. As I say at the end, I am passionate about this stuff so if you ever want to chat about it, seriously, contact me. Here we go……

If you’ve been around me you’ve probably heard me say this, but it bears repeating:  As soon as you, the marketer, pay for a search click, someone will want to know what you got for it.

This means that you will need effective ways to both optimize and report out results on your campaign. This is yet another example of how search marketers can excel in otherwise uncharted territory (e.g. brand campaigns)

Optimization

I mentioned last month that in order to optimize to engagement we decided to place tracking pixels on a number of ‘expressions of interest’ that were relevant to the brand campaign. The challenge with this approach is in the design. Since the events in question do not drive direct revenue we had to use an approach that would value expressions of interest in an accurate way, relatively speaking.

As I mentioned we opted for a points system and grouped conversion events into strata so that we could create a more traditional ‘funnel’ for reporting and optimization purposes. By seeing how users were engaging with the brand we were not only able to optimize to deeper engagement at a keyword level, but we also learned how to refine our ‘funnel’ to better reflect the engagement process.

Furthermore, because as search marketers we are accustomed to optimizing on fresh data, we used daily conversion data to quickly optimize the campaigns and make landing page and user path recommendations. This put us way ahead of other channels, which do not lend themselves as readily to rapid optimization.

Once the design is in place and the data is flowing, sit back and pretend you’re running a direct response campaign. Optimize to conversion volume or cost per conversion, whichever will support the goals of the brand campaign. Identify strong performing ads and place new ads in rotation as often as possible. Believe me, this is the easy part. Now it’s time to show everyone what a brilliant marketer you are.

Reporting

Be ready to report out on your results in a concise and telling way. Remember, you have different components to your campaign and likely a number of countries or markets in which you’re advertising, so you’ll need a neat way to wrap up all that activity into a one-page report. This is where the direct marketer in you can truly shine.

If you have the luxury of reporting on revenue, congratulations. If not, then use a system like we’ve chosen where you can show value expressed in points or some equivalent measure, and then just use the same types of metrics you normally would for SEM reporting. Impressions, clicks, CPC, value (points), cost per point, etc. Organize your reporting in such a way that higher-ups can quickly get high-level data and then drill down into markets or campaigns to assess the drivers of success or failure. Here’s an example of what it might look like:

In addition to metrics-heavy reporting like this, you’ll also want to include some graphs that speak to trends over time. This way you’ll be able to tell a story of how you launched and then optimized your campaigns. That report will look something like this:

Once your reporting is ironed out and being delivered on a regular basis to your internal stakeholders, now it’s time once to show how search marketing performance can run circles around other marketing channels. You may already know this as well as some of your counterparts in other marketing channels, but chances are your head of brand marketing needs a reminder. If your SEM results can be rolled up into larger buckets of ‘digital media’ or total media, the comparisons will be inevitable. Show your SEM results along side those same metrics for display ads and other channels.

Then, when it comes time to plan the next quarter or the next campaign, you can point to your outstanding results and ask for a healthy budget increase. I just did.

So that’s all for SEM and branding. There is, of course, abundant detail I haven’t the space to include here, so if you want more, feel free to contact me. I love talking about this stuff.

Vanessa Zamora is one of the great people in the industry. She does most of the interviews for WebMasterWorld these days, and she is a delight to work with. We caught up at SES San Jose last month and talked about SEO tools and Social Media marketing. Thanks, Vanessa. PANTS!

http://www.pubcon.com/videoblog/index.cgi?mode=viewone&blog=1252950120

My new friends over at WebProNews posted this yesterday. Mike McDonald interviewed me at SES San Jose in August, and they did a real nice job of producing the piece. The interview is pretty consistent with this blog, we talk about what it means to manage search marketing at a big, complex organization like Yahoo!

Here it is…

http://videos.webpronews.com/2009/09/01/inside-the-world-of-yahoo-seo/

How should we organize around social media?

Last month, we took a look at Big Brands and how we’re approaching Social Media. After I wrote that column, which talked a lot about how the book on Social Media largely remains to be written for big brands, a number of things happened. First of all, we had our annual internal SEO and Social Media conference at Yahoo!, where we spent a great deal of time talking about how we, as a company, should organize around social media. Then, I spent a few days at SES San Jose talking to folks around the industry as well as catching up with some of the presenters from our internal conference. Finally, at Yahoo! we began to take the first steps toward really organizing and coordinating our social media efforts. All the ensuing conversation gave me a glimpse of at least one possible picture of how big brands will successfully latch onto social media and use it intelligently as marketing channel going forward.

You Are Here

The truth is that at Yahoo! and other big brands, there is already a decent amount of social media marketing going on right now. As well, it’s normally the case that these efforts, however many and however significant, are not being coordinated in any way. Sound familiar? It should, because this is the age-old challenge with Search Marketing, both paid and organic, in large organizations. Perhaps that’s why as search marketers, we find ourselves both drawn to social media and in the center of the conversation about social media in large, multi-divisional companies.

So, now that we’re engaged in the conversation, what do we do? This is the question I asked repeatedly to everyone who would listen in the past two weeks. One of the most well-thought out answers came from Bill Hunt, who happens to have just wrote a column on Centers of Excellence (CoE) for search and social media.

In his post, Bill does a great job of defining the CoE role as it relates to search marketing, and then teases us on the topic of social media. I was lucky enough to spend some time hanging out with Bill and we were able to dig a bit deeper on the topic. It turns out that many of the ways in which SEO plays out in large organizations have direct analogues in the world of social media.

Take it From the Top

In order to succeed, you need to start with executive buy-in, and you need a focal point for the CoE who can act as the expert. This is normally someone from Marketing, Corporate Communications, or Public Relations, but I think the key is that this person needs to be empowered in this position and backed by a C-class executive. This is the person who ultimately will set standards, key performance indicators (KPIs), serve as the primary social media evangelist, and define high-level strategy. Perhaps most importantly, this person needs to clearly outline the scope of social media at your company. In other words, how many points of presence (think facebook pages or twitter feeds) will the company have? What topics will get representation? Who owns each point of presence? These are the tough decisions your thought leader will have to make.

Supporting the leader of this group there needs to be a resource (ideally a small team) of people who can roll out the strategy into practice. These folks will generate the documentation to support standards, conduct social media audits, build the facebook pages, dictate conventions for twitter hashtags, and will coordinate with SEO, engineering and other neighboring groups. They will also have to handle governance, which Bill points out is not enforcement, but ideally looks more like stewardship and guidance. Finally, this team will need to be responsible for measuring success against the KPIs that have previously been established.

If You Can’t Measure It, It Doesn’t Exist

This is one of our credos in our direct marketing group at Yahoo!, and it translates to social media. What are we trying to accomplish with social media, and how will we measure it? This will be tricky, because most of the metrics associated with social media are fairly soft. Do yourself a favor here and start simple. Track unique users from social media as a starting point. Do you have any type of valuation for new users on your site? If not, make some assumptions, just remember to go back later and validate them. One example of this was pointed out during a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a company that builds viral applications for facebook. The example goes something like this: start out with a promotion to your existing client base. Measure the amount of customers who enter the promotion. Put it out on facebook and measure the viral adoption. When the promotion is over, you will then know how many new users or customers you’ve adopted via this promotion as it runs through a social media application. The associated lift is your return on your marketing investment.

Build on Your Success

An early win will be critical to your social media success. Find something measurable that works, and use this as your blueprint for your next project. Celebrate your victory, give credit to all who participated and look for ways to replicate this model around your organization. The next piece in the puzzle is to drill down into the specific tasks to execute on this strategy, but we’ll save that for another column….

I’m increasingly intrigued by the many ways companies are trying to use social media, and I’m amazed at how hard it is for big brands to do a good job with this medium. This post looks as some of these challenges and searches for some lessons out there in the social media space.

“What’s our Social Media Strategy?”

Has anyone in your company asked you this lately, or at all? Chances are if you haven’t heard this question from a VP yet, you will soon. It’s what everyone is trying to figure out – not if we should be using social media, but how we should be using it. In this column I’m going to look at a few ways that we at Yahoo!, and others, are using social media and how it’s evolving from a big-brand perspective.

But First, a Bit of Perspective

Why is it that SEOs typically end up being the ones in their respective companies who are responsible for social media? On the surface the two activities have little in common. SEO can be very technical in nature, both in strategy and in practice, while social media looks a lot more a like a public relations campaign. But just to reset, when sites like myspace, facebook, twitter, even Digg started to become popular, SEOs could readily see the potential for promoting their own sites. Social media in the beginning was a double-whammy: not only could SEOs get bloggers and other authorities to link to their sites, providing link relevance, but they also got the incremental traffic coming from users following those links. The link-building aspect has since been downplayed with the advent of nofollow tags, but the traffic source is very real and very powerful if you can get links put in the right places.

So now that social media is becoming much more mainstream (as has SEO), how does a big brand use social media to its full potential? As well, who in the organization should own social media marketing? When I look around at how we and other big brands are using social media, it’s clear that social media’s role (and rightful owner in the organization) has yet to be fully defined. Let’s look at a few examples and we’ll see.

Survey the Landscape

Try this if you haven’t already: Go to facebook and search for your favorite big brand, be it online or offline. Where is the company’s official facebook page? The fan page? Specific product pages? Hard to tell, isn’t it? This is one of the challenges with the social media landscape. As a brand loyalist, do I really want to sift through all those entries so I can find the group that speaks to me? Try the same thing on twitter – these spaces are already so crowded it’s hard to find the signal for all the noise. If these networks are going to be viable for commercial use, and one could argue that they will have to be in order to survive, social networks will need to find some way to stratify the landscape, to draw lines between the commercial and the non-commercial, without alienating the user base. But enough of that, let’s look at some of the ways that big brands are trying to use social media to their advantage.

Customer Support

Some companies are starting to leverage social media as a form of enhanced customer support. The reason is that it enables brands to have a dialogue with their customers in a new way. I saw a presentation recently about how a company was using twitter to communicate with its customers in conjunction with their Superbowl ad. Other companies are using similar platforms to field support questions, akin to an 800-number or web chat. This works to a degree, but when you look at the volume of inquiries coming through say, twitter, with incoming emails and phone calls it hardly looks like a relevant channel at this point.

Community Marketing

Many companies now have their own facebook group that customers can join. This means of community marketing shows a great deal of potential (assuming customers can find the right page – see above). The additional challenge here is that companies largely have not figured out how to use this to their advantage. For example, I joined the facebook group of one of my favorite wineries in Sonoma, but in fact there’s very little that happens there. The winery isn’t posting much in the way of notices, promotional or otherwise, and the customers, although you would think they would be posting about their favorite wines and discussing such topics, rarely do anything of the sort. I think the lesson here is that it’s not enough to simply put up a page – as a marketer you need to first generate a critical mass. Naturally, if you’re a winery in Sonoma, you will need to work much harder at this than if you’re a top internet site.  Once critical mass is there, brands can offer their social communities first access to promotions, product previews, exclusive content, anything to allow this community to deepen engagement with your brand.

Protecting Your Brand

One of the things that social media does for big brands is to magnify consumer opinions, both positive and negative. This can be scary for brand owners who have grown accustomed to controlling their brand image and messaging. The notion that one dissatisfied customer can post a bad review on Yelp and dominate the image of the brand online has some marketers and business owners in a cold sweat late at night. Relax. Fight fire with fire. The best thing a brand owner can do is to leverage his own community and ask them to write their own reviews using the same channels. The above mentioned winery did a great job of this, posting a link on their facebook page, inviting members to go to yelp and write reviews.

Let’s Be Careful Out There

One thing businesses should be aware of is that social media can be a double-edged sword. I was talking to a friend on the train today who revealed how he used twitter as a competitive intelligence and sales tool. He was monitoring tweets from and about his competitors and could tell who his competitor was selling to. From that point a well-placed sales call is all it takes to get a meeting with the right party to close a deal. Big brands don’t need to fear this particular tactic so much, but the lesson remains – assume that whatever you post in social media will be read by everyone, and use this as a filter when crafting your social media messaging.

What’s Ahead?

Despite the staggering numbers associated with the rise of social media, I don’t think we quite know what to do with it yet. Sure, we like it when celebrities tweet, but I think we will all agree that we don’t care if my cousin Vinny just ate a really good steak. We may be interested in facebook updates from some of our friends, but the sheer volume of posts makes it almost impossible to find anything useful or interesting. I think the people who are really going to capitalize on the medium will be the ones who find the niches where this medium really excels and build products that live in these niches. I have some friends, for example, who are looking at this space closely, and have figured out a really slick way to create deep and meaningful dialogue among groups of people. The beauty is that this happens in an anonymous mobile environment where people interact freely and in real-time, reducing the inevitable clutter and noise that come with existing social networks. I could go on and on about this – you’ll just have to follow my tweets if you want to know more.

So I’ve had this one on the back burner for a while and I guess the time is now…

I’m going just a bit off topic this month. It may seem a stretch, but bear with me, there is a modicum of relevance to this column. You see, most of my ideas for Industrial Strength columns, as well as the bulk of my SEL column writing, take place on either the Capitol 523 or the 542. These are the trains that I take to get to and from work. While I work in Sunnyvale, CA, I live in El Cerrito, just over 50 miles away. Why I live so far from work is yet another long story, so let’s stay on topic here.

All aboard for Silicon Valley

The Capitol Corridor is the name of the rail service I take, and despite the fact that it’s been in operation for 20 years and now enjoys its highest ridership in its history, it always surprises me how few people have actually heard of it. Its more famous Bay Area mass transit cousins are BART and CalTrain. BART is the light rail system that services most of the Bay Area, focusing mainly on customers who commute into San Francisco for work. On a given workday, 300,000 riders take BART. CalTrain, which runs on a normal gauge rail, runs up and down the Peninsula from San Francisco to San Jose and points beyond. It services commuters who live in San Francisco and work in Silicon Valley, as well as those who live on the Peninsula and work in The City. CalTrain serviced 12 million passengers last year.

The Capitol Corridor, which runs on the Union Pacific line from Sacramento to San Jose, carried a mere 1.5 million delighted passengers to work and back during the same period. It is operated by Amtrak, a bit of a throwback, if you will. It’s comfortable, there are table tops, electrical outlets, even a café car. And although it’s not the fastest way to get from A to B, it’s a whole lot better than sitting in traffic on Interstate 880, which is enough to make you want to jam an ice pick in your ear.

I get on the Capitol in the morning and ride down the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay to Santa Clara. My fellow Yahoos and I then pile into leased vans and drive the 3-4 miles to the main Yahoo! campus. In the evening, we meet at the same vans and head back to the train station. The 542 takes me back up the Bay and drops me a couple miles from my house, where I get into my car and make the short drive home.

Slow going

The major drawback of taking the train, of course, is the speed. It takes me two hours door to door, each way. So if I take the train 5 days a week, every week, that would amount to a whopping 1000 hours of commuting time per year. That’s a lot of time to think about SEL columns! But just like search marketing, train commuting is a process that takes time, and there’s just no getting around it. Regardless of the time and work invested in both, I try to make sure it’s time well spent. As it is on the train, if I mix in a little telecommuting and a minimum of driving (sans ice pick), it’s pretty tolerable. Did I mention they serve cocktails in the Café Car?

Upside: train traveling is a social network

One of the best things about riding the train, other than the obvious fact that I don’t have to hit the road, is the people. My aunt, who grew up in Connecticut, regales me with tales of her father, who commuted to New York City by train for 30 years. From her accounts, the friendships her father formed with his fellow commuters were much stronger than those he had with his co-workers. He changed jobs over the years, but continued to keep in touch with his commuting buddies well after he had retired. I can relate to that.

 This is essentially my social network of follow commuters. I ride with people from a wide spectrum of talents – marketers, engineers, business owners - who by and large work in the tech industry in the Silicon Valley, so it’s a great way to keep up not only with what’s going on in my industry, but also with the tech sector on the whole. Plus, there’s something about sharing your commute to and from work with others that builds deep relationships. I think it’s several factors. First of all, there’s just the amount of time spent together that give you a wide range of topics to ponder and discuss. Second, you never know what’s going to happen once you’re on the rail, and sharing those (sometimes harrowing) experiences deepens bonds between people.

No trespassing: rail blocks ahead

Sometimes people think it’s funny to leave bicycles and shopping carts on the tracks for the train to run over them. While I don’t share that sentiment, these incidents aren’t so bad because if there’s no damage to the train, the conductors can get us going again in 10-20 minutes. The real problem is trespassers. Trespassers are people who end up on the tracks in front of a speeding train.

Most of the time, trespassing is an intentional and final act of a desperate and often depressed individual, but not always. Apparently, it’s quite challenging to estimate the distance and closing speed of a moving train, because some people still try to cross the train tracks in front of us. Some are on their way to school, others play chicken. One unfortunate lady was dragged into the path of an oncoming train several weeks ago by her large dog, which she was walking at the time. Note to self: Don’t walk the dog near the tracks.

As you can imagine, when a trespasser incident occurs, aside from the obvious tragedy (not to mention the trauma caused to the train engineer), the ensuing 2-3 hour delay waiting for the police and coroner to finish their work gives me plenty of time to question the wisdom of rail travel (see Cocktails, above). It’s good to remember that in train commuting, just as in direct marketing, strange things can happen that bring with them unforeseen consequences, and you have to be ready to adjust your strategy on the fly. If it’s not a trespasser on the tracks, it could be a drop in conversion rate or a change in a ranking algorithm that send your results skewing sideways. You just have to roll with the punches and adapt quickly.

How much longer?

Some informal observation tells me that the average shelf life of a train commuter in the Bay Area is about two and a half years (although one guy on my train has been at it over 15 years!). At that point, commuters generally either get another job closer to home, or come to their senses and move closer to work. I’ve been taking the train for three years and change, and although I can’t see myself either changing my job or moving my home in the immediate future, I can’t help but wonder: how long will I last as a rail commuter? I’ve managed to stick with search marketing as long as I have largely because I truly believe that the majority of online marketing will be managed in a similar fashion to Search in the coming years, and that puts me, professionally, in a very good place. So I imagine I’ll be sticking with train commuting, and search marketing, for some time to come.